All year long, we’re bombarded with body-shaming narratives: warnings about losing weight in time for “swimsuit season,” harmful food and body comments around the holiday dinner table, and “new year, new you” diet ads. Given this barrage of toxic messaging, it’s completely understandable that you might feel bad about your body shape or size—and, since we live in an extremely anti-fat culture, that this internal body image struggle might cause some of us to think or even say out loud, “Ugh, I feel so fat!”
I’m a fat person myself, so I know full well that the word “fat” can be shorthand for so many negative feelings—hating a photo of yourself, being generally unsatisfied with your body, or even feeling socially rejected. (“Fat” isn’t a bad word, by the way. It’s just the way my body exists in the world.) But it’s worth reevaluating the use of the phrase “I feel fat” because fat is not a feeling—it’s an accessibility issue.
If you’ve been using “feeling fat” to express your discontentment with your body, please know that I’m not saying your feelings aren’t valid. Our culture tells us if we just lost x number of pounds or dropped y clothing sizes, all of our problems would be solved. But the goalposts are always changing in that game of body-size cat-and-mouse; there will never be a size that is small enough or perfect enough, which can leave us feeling like we are never enough. However, what I am saying is that using “fat” to describe a feeling only reinforces our culture’s harmful body ideals and weight biases.
Fat people face myriad everyday limitations and prejudices, and treating fatness as a fleeting state of mind is another way of overlooking and dismissing these very real issues. As part of the bigger project of reframing the thinking about fatness to be more neutral and inclusive, it’s important to recognize the difference between “feeling” fat versus actually being fat.
You’ll know if you’re actually fat—versus just “feeling” fat—based on how you’re accommodated by the world.
You might be wondering, But who is actually fat, Amanda? How can I tell the difference between using “fat” to accurately describe my body and just engaging in anti-fat self-talk? Good questions! Of course, body size exists on a spectrum, and it makes sense to assume that being fat is somewhat a matter of opinion, but to me, it’s actually more clear-cut than that: Fatness is about accommodation.
I think of something like the chair test, where you ask yourself, Do I need alternative seating in public or private spaces, or is seating not something I have to think about? If you don’t get bruised or squished by seats with arms, you’re probably not fat. In other words, it doesn’t matter how you feel; the world is either excluding you based on your fatness, or it’s not. That’s why claiming fatness when you’re not fat is a big deal. It’s about the real exclusion of an entire people group from the public square.
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